The Science Unfiltered Podcast has launched the show’s third episode discussing trending science headlines, best way to work with oligonucleotides, and some announcements from Phenomenex.
This episode talks about some amazing trending headlines in the world of science.
We kick off the episode talking about how the Dutch nonprofit, the Ocean Cleanup, has officially started catching plastic and making a dent on the Great Pacific Garage Patch. The patch is can be found hundreds of miles between the coasts of California and Hawaii and is twice the size of Texas, expanding nearly a million square miles in the Pacific Ocean. Ocean currents have brought the vast patch together where it is kept in it’s rough formation by an ocean gyre, a whirlpool of currents.
In 2013, Boyan Slat, and 18-year-old entrepreneur, became determined to take steps to eliminate that patch. He founded The Ocean Cleanup and crowdfunded nearly $2.2 million.
His team built an enormous free-floating device, roughly 2,000 feet in size, to passively collect trash inside the garbage patch. The C-shaped plastic pipe is connected to a screen that spans 10 feet below the water’s surface. After a few set-backs, the Ocean Cleanup is finally catching trash ranging from items like 1 ton ghost nets to tiny microplastics. The device is fitted with transmitters and sensors to a vessel that will collect the gathered rubbish every few months.
And if we can’t get the earth cleaned up enough to continue sustaining healthy life, Venus may be our next option!
According to NASA, Venus may be have been a perfectly habitable environment for 2 to 3 billion years after the planet had formed. This suggests that life would have had ample time to emerge there.
NASA’s Pioneer Venus spacecraft found in 1978 evidence that the planet may have once had shallow oceans on its surface. Since then, several missions have investigated the planet’s surface and atmosphere, revealing new details on how it transitioned from an “Earth-like” planet to the hot, hellish place it is today.
It is believed that drastic climate shifts 700 million year ago made the planet’s atmosphere incredibly dense, triggering a greenhouse effect, causing a release of carbon dioxide stored in the rocks of the planet making it too hot for life to survive.
Researchers from NASA claim that under stable climate conditions, Venus would have been able to support liquid water, and in turn, possibly allow life to emerge. In fact, if the planet hadn’t experienced the resurfacing event, it might have remained habitable today.
And finally, researchers may have just found a way to cure the world of the common cold. The team discovered that instead of attacking the cold virus directly, scientists have targeted an essential protein inside our cells that the virus needs in order to replicate and spread in the body. To read more about this amazing step in riding the world of the common cold, click the link for our article “Tired of Getting the Common Cold? Scientists May Have Found the Cure!”.
Episode 3 of the Science Unfiltered Podcast also heard from special guest, Technical Expert – Brian Rivera, as he takes us through the steps of how to best work with therapeutic synthetic oligonucleotides. Brian not only gave us a fun way to listen about oligonucleotides, he brought us our new and original theme song with the Science Unfiltered Podcast!
Listen to episode 3 now to catch up on all the latest! You can catch the Science Unfiltered Podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Spotify.
Haven’t listened to the first two yet? Go back now and get started by clicking the links below:
“Introducing the Science Unfiltered Podcast”
“NEW Science Unfiltered Podcast: Episode 2”